Building a New Middle Class in the Knowledge Economy

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 has made policymakers and politicians in the U.S. much more aware of an important demographic group – the white working class – than before.

We have ignored their plight and their concerns for far too long, and have grown much too complacent about the extent to which they have fallen behind more-educated groups and shared insufficiently in the economic growth we’ve experienced in the past few decades.

Of course, even before the election, labor market analysts and demographers had been discovering that the economic and social outcomes we observe among a large group of less-educated Americans – particularly men with high school or less education – were stagnating or deteriorating.